Peru

Urban Informal Sector

In 1990 the vast
"informal sector" (see Glossary)
of Lima's
economy was the most striking feature of its commercial
life.
There, 91,000 street vendors, 54 percent of them women,
sold food
in the streets or public squares of central Lima or the
residential area of Miraflores, the upscale mecca of the
city.
Street vendors have been a part of Lima life and culture
since
early colonial times, and the city government has
persistently
attempted to remove them to fixed market places.
Nevertheless,
street commerce in Lima throughout the colonial period and
until
the twentieth century was generally regarded as a
colorful,
folkloric aspect of urban life and was often depicted in
period
paintings and descriptions. Since the great migrations
began in
the early 1950s, however, the city elites have come to
disdain
the street vendors who swarm over the Rímac Bridge every
afternoon. As Hernando de Soto has abundantly documented
in El
otro sendero (The Other Path), this
freewheeling
entrepreneurial sector of the labor force was, in the
1980s,
producing the equivalent of almost 40 percent of the
national
income. As "unregistered" business, this activity is
outside the
control of the national economic institutions, whose
cumbersome
and often corrupt bureaucratic regulations stifle
initiatives,
especially if one lacks resources to pay all the bribes
and
formal start-up costs. In the circumstances of 1991, the
public
need to participate in the economy had, in essence,
neutralized
and bypassed the official system
(see Nonparty Organizations
, ch.
4).